Beck – Mellow Gold (CD)

Mellow Gold arrived in early 1994 and immediately scrambled the cultural signals, pairing lo-fi folk weirdness with hip-hop collage and a smirk that never quite let you in on the joke. Beck Hansen recorded much of it on a four-track in his Los Angeles bedroom, and that homemade scrappiness is inseparable from why it still sounds like nothing else from its era.